Syria, the uprising and the media scene

The Syrian revolutionary
process is a more thoroughly documented uprising than has ever been seen before
in history, notably thanks to these democratic media.

2012, rising up chasing freedom. 2017, chased us out of freedom (the man is holding a flag of Jaysh al-Islam)
Before the
uprising Syria’s media were in the hands of the regime and dominated by the business
figures linked to it. At the beginning of the uprising, there was a surge of
new media actors linked to the protest movements and the democratic space they
opened up.

The uprising
allowed for a general process of politicization among the large sectors of
society involved in the revolutionary process, reflected in the creation of new
newspapers, websites, blogs, groups in social networks, and so forth.

Even now some
of them still exist, despite the ongoing attacks and repressive actions on what
is left of the protest movement, especially by the forces of Assad’s regime and
their allies. The democratic protest movements have also suffered from the
authoritarian practices of various Islamic fundamentalist forces.

Prior to the uprising

Syria had three government-controlled
national newspapers, state radio and state TV, all committed to strengthening
the legitimacy of the Assad regime. Pan-Arabist newspapers al-Hayat and al-Sharq
al-Awsat, as well as Lebanese, Jordanian and Gulf Arab titles, and a small
number of private magazines, were available and allowed in the 2000s. The
political parties of the Progressive National Front (PNF), supportive of the
regime, were also authorized to publish their own weekly newspapers.

However, the country was
still far from having a pluralist and free press. This media landscape failed
to offer a real public discourse as private media were controlled by
personalities linked to the regime. In
September 2001, the Syrian regime actually adopted a new Press Law (Decree No.
50/2001), which provided the government with sweeping controls over virtually everything printed in Syria: newspapers, magazines,
other periodicals, books, pamphlets, posters, etc. Syria was 173rd of 178
countries in a 2010 ranking of press freedom around the world by Reporters
Without Borders.

The authorities did not
hesitate to censor the content of newspapers they considered had crossed the
line. For example, the first privately owned newspaper al-Dommari, owned by caricaturist Ali Ferzat, was authorized to
resume publication by the regime after nearly 40 years in early 2001, appeared
on June 17, 2001 with two blank pages when Prime Minister Muhammad Miro took
personal offence at an article deemed critical of the government’s performance.
He also censored another article written about an imminent cabinet reshuffle.[1]

In the short window of
opportunity between 2000 and 2001 referred to as the “Damascus Spring”, an opposition
critic such as Michel Kilo was allowed to publish articles critical of the
regime in the local state-controlled press, particularly al-Thawra, until that again ended in repression by the regime.

Repression against bloggers
critical of the regime was the rule throughout the 2000s and on the eve of the
uprising. Kamal Cheikho, a Kurdish militant and blogger was arrested for
example in June 2010. In mid-February 2011, the State Security Court sentenced
the blogger Tal al-Mallouhi, arrested in December 2009, to five years’
imprisonment. She was accused of spying for a foreign country, but the reason
for her severe reprimand stemmed from her blogging and online activities. She
actually wrote poems and essays that focused on the suffering of the
Palestinians, and she discussed the restrictions on freedom of expression. She
actually wrote poems and essays that focused on the suffering of the
Palestinians, and she discussed the restrictions on freedom of expression.

In middle and late February
2011, it was Ahmad Hadifa’s turn. Known as Ahmad Aboul-Kheir, he was arrested
for a few days when his blog offered guidelines for circumventing the censorship
of sites blocked by the authorities. This was at a time when articles on the
revolutions that had erupted in Tunisia and Egypt raised the possibility of
contagion to other countries in the region.

There were however some groups present on the web, but also on the
ground, trying to promote democratic and progressive political thought. The Al-Thara
Group was for example the first website to raise the banner for women’s and
children’s rights. Between 2005 and 2011, the al-Thara Group trained more than
sixty journalists in the arts of maintaining a free media, while it was also
partner to a number of other organizations, participating in joint campaigns
such as that against honor killing, or involved in the drafting of the parallel
report for the Beijing World Conference on Women in 2010. People working on these
websites frequently participated in feminist civil society activity, such as
lectures, parades, workshops, and conferences. They played an important role in
creating new perspectives, through the social exchanges that took place on
their websites, for advancing women’s rights in Syria.[2]

The regime was afraid of activists and individuals engaging in dialogue on
political issues, especially those with democratic and progressive orientation
who gathered Syrians from various religious and ethnic backgrounds. For example
in June 2007 when seven students from various religious backgrounds, including
two Alawis, were sentenced to prison terms for online conversation about
political reform, the arresting officer explained that, “these youths are more
dangerous than al-Qa’ida, because they come from all sects”. This strategy of
repression would be the same during the uprising: it was the democratic and
progressive sectors of the popular movement who were targeted first.

Syria’s media tycoons

Similarly, the
so-called new ‘private’ media scene which appeared, following Bashar al-Assad’s
arrival to power in 2000, was far from creating a space for open and democratic
debate.

Syria’s most
influential media tycoons were a collection of wealthy businessmen with close
connections to the regime’s political, military and business establishment.
They included Rami Makhlouf, Majd Bahjat Sulayman, Bilal Turkmani (son of
Defense Minister Hassan Turkmani), Mohamed Saber Hamsho, Aktham Ali Duba, and
steel tycoon Ayman Jaber.

Rami
Makhlouf established the popular Al-Watan newspaper. Majd Bahjat Sulayman,
owner of Syria’s largest media empire, was the executive director of Alwaseet
Group, and chairman of the United Group for Publishing, Advertising and
Marketing (UG). Ayman Jaber and Mohamed Saber Hamsho, alongside a number of
other Syrian businessmen, established Dunia TV and Sama satellite channel.
Aktham Ali Douba, the son of the former head of Syrian intelligence, formed the
al-Riyadiya newspaper and magazine
with a clear monopoly on sports advertising.[3]

These same crony capitalists
first tried their hand at funding the regime’s orchestrated mass rallies and
public relations campaigns, while the private media owned by these businessmen
linked to the regime from the first days of the uprising in an attempt to
undermine the message of the protesters by defaming the protest movement and
promoting the regime’s propaganda.

Rise of revolutionary media

“These youths are more
dangerous than al-Qa’ida, because they come from all sects.”

The beginning of the uprising
and especially its first two years featured a wave of civilian resistance using
various means, including the media. In this period, people witnessed a surge of
free newspapers throughout the country, but especially in areas liberated from
the regime’s forces. The phenomenon of citizen journalists expanded considerably and news became a basic
act of resistance carried out by Syrians in their revolt against the Assad
regime. Over time, video activism was evolving into a homegrown
journalistic scene with tiny local papers and online radio stations
broadcasting openly in the liberated areas and underground in those under
Assad’s control. By the end of 2011, Syrian Media Action Revolution Team
(SMART), which was originally a support network for journalists activists and
then became a news agency, was distributing equipment (satellite modems to
connect to the Internet, telephones) and taught writing and production via
Skype. The organization trained nearly 400 activists in journalism.

Villages and cities
experiencing revolts established a number of smaller local newspapers, such as Oxigen
run in the city of Zabadani; while some were able to reach wider audiences
across the country, including Enab Baladi
(Local Grapes) a paper from Daraya and Damascus established at the end of 2011
by a group of 30 intellectuals and activists, including 14 women;[4]
or Souriatna (Our Syria) managed from
Istanbul, etc… (Dahnoun 2012; Foreign staff in Zabadani 2012, Culebras 2015a).
Similarly, numerous local radio stations were established by activists within
and outside the country. For example, Radio Fresh was set up by the activist
Raed Fares in Kafranbel in the Idlib countryside, running it as a media center
and a magazine published four times a year. “Sawt Raya” based in Istanbul, was
founded by Alisar Hasan, along with a group of Syrian journalists broadcasting
news and other programs, or ANA Radio established in early 2012 with the aim of
increasing citizen journalism within Syria by ANA New Media Association – the
network behind the station.

The famous journalist Zaina Erhaim for example, worked within Syria for
long periods and joined the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)[5] helping
to establish a series of blogs that covered the history of the uprising and war
through the eyes of Syrian women, by allowing regular citizens to write stories
of their own experiences. She also trained hundreds of citizen reporters from
inside Syria, approximately a third of them women, in print and TV journalism. She
then was behind the initiative for a series of short films, “Syria’s Rebellious
Women,” telling the stories of women who had stepped into positions of
leadership and responsibility. She also trained hundreds of citizen reporters from
inside Syria, approximately a third of them women, in print and TV journalism.

According to the Syrian Media
Action Revolution Team (SMART), in September 2014 there were about 500 print journals[6] and about 20 radio stations, while it was estimated that
as many as 298 newspapers being circulated in different parts of the country during various periods of the
uprising.[7]

Similarly, some autonomous
actors in the Kurdish political and social scenes from the PYD, such as Radio
Arta, were still trying to make their voices heard despite being targeted at
least twice by PYD armed forces in 2014 and 2016. A vibrant independent media
scene was trying to develop in PYD-controlled areas, regardless of the tough
competition that came from better resourced and more numerous PYD party-affiliated
media outlets (such as Ronahi TV, Orkes FM, and Hawar News Agency, among
others).

Democratic journalists and
citizen media actors were all the target of the regime because of their role in
informing the world of the crimes and exactions of the security services.
Between mid-March 2011 and the end of April 2014, the Violation Document
Center, a network of Syrian opposition activists documenting human rights
violations perpetrated since the beginning of the uprising, documented the
death of 307 journalists thanks to the firepower of the regime’s forces and
militias. Syria became almost
the world’s deadliest country for journalists, according to the 2017 World
Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, in which it is ranked 177th
out of 180 countries.

Gulf media promoting sectarianism

However, there were other
enemies that the infant democratic media scene had to confront. Gulf monarchies
and their media promoted a sectarian understanding of the uprising in Syria,
attempting to turn it into a sectarian conflict between Shi’a and Sunni, while
they hosted many Salafist sheikhs who would use Gulf channels to promote their
sectarian discourse. As early as March 25, 2011, the Egyptian Salafist Sheikh
Youssef Qaradawi, residing in Qatar and widely believed to be close to the Muslim
Brotherhood, and a weekly guest on al-Jazeera television with his own program,
declared:

“The
President Assad treats the people as if he is Sunni, and he is educated and
young and he might be able to do a lot, but his problem is that he is a prisoner
of his entourage and religious sect”.[8]

Syrian protesters at the
beginning of the uprising held banners opposing sectarian discourse like the
slogan, the ‘Sunni blood is one’, promoted by some Gulf channels, while
chanting instead in favour of the unity of the Syrian people.

In May 2013, the same Sheikh
Youssef al-Qaradawi declared a jihad on the Syrian regime at a rally in Qatar,
calling for Sunni Muslims to join the fight against president Bashar al-Assad
and his Shi’a support base, in addition to calling the Alawi sect “more infidel
than Christians and Jews”. He added “How
could 100 million Shi’a [worldwide] defeat 1.7 billion [Sunnis]?".[9]
Similarly, the Râbitat al’âlam al-îslâmi
(Muslim World League), an association of Islamic clerics established in 1962 and
serving as a political instrument of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, repeatedly characterized
the Syrian regime as a “rogue Nusayri regime” …“stressing the obligation of
supporting the Muslims of Syria and saving them from sectarian conspiracy”, in
other words from the Shi’a.[10]

Gulf television channels also
fuelled sectarian tensions from the beginning of the uprising. Faisal
al-Qassim, a presenter on Jazeera Channel, hosted a segment on whether Syria’s
Alawite population deserved genocide, while al-Arabiya welcomed Syrian Salafist cleric Adnan al-Arour, who
once promised to “chop you (Alawites) up and feed you to the dogs”.[11]

Similarly, Islamic
fundamentalists movements in Syria had their own media and propaganda tools,
which promoted their own reactionary and sectarian discourses. They also did
not hesitate to repress and detain independent citizen journalists critical of
their actions and policies in areas under their control, while banning magazines from
opposition groups.

In August 2017 for example, “Rising
for Freedom” magazine was outlawed in Douma, and two of its journalists sent to
jail over an article published earlier this year by a court controlled by the salafist
organisation Jaysh al-Islam. The offices of the magazine and NGOs including the
Violations Documentation Centre (VDC) were shut down in March 2017, and VDC was
closed again in mid August by Jaysh al-Islam after being attacked by a mob of
its supporters. As a reminder, Jaysh al-Islam is the ruling authority in
the Eastern Ghouta and had embroiled “Rising for Freedom” staff in a succession
of disputes from its founding moment.

Unfortunately some Syrian opposition media also promoted a sectarian discourse on occasion. For example Orient TV owned by
exiled Syrian businessman Ghassan Abboud, known for
his sectarian diatribes, actually presented the massacre in May 2015 of
more than 40 civilians, including children, by IS fighters in the mixed town of
Majaoubé, composed of Sunni, Isma'ili and Alawi, as members of the regime’s
forces. This presentation of the events provoked a significant controversy as
this was considered a justification for a sectarian crime.

“Pro-regime” constituencies also criticise
officialdom

As mentioned above, the
uprising created an upsurge in the independent media run by popular activists.
But a fresh dynamic was also created among what were called “pro-regime
constituencies”. Alongside official state media instruments and the Syrian
Electronic Army directly controlled by the regime, pro-regime media outlets and
Facebook pages multiplied significantly and had some impact on the traditional
media landscape of the regime.

These new media outlets usually
resorted to the Internet, and in particular to social media such as Facebook,
to publish content. This avoided the necessity of acquiring an operating
license and the long bureaucratic procedures that were still implemented in
regime-held areas. These pro-regime Facebook pages, often based on a network of
people from a particular village, neighbourhood or city and operating
autonomously from the regime’s control and its associate elites, generally
reinforced the regime’s narrative, becoming, for example, key sources of
information on military movements and local incidents often not covered in
state media. Researcher Antun Issa has explained, “They represent the ‘mood’ of the communities that support the
government, and thus can be viewed as a barometer of support for the regime”.[12]

But this was also the case when
these pages or media outlets raised criticisms against some sectors of the
regime, and condemned some of its behaviour. A Facebook post on the pro-regime
“Syria Corruption in the Age of Reform” page for example was highly critical of
state-run media, labelling them as “traitors” for refuting the opposition armed
forces’ military gains in Aleppo in August 2016[13].
A few months later, regime supporters used social media to expose the looting by pro-regime militias of some neighbourhoods of
Aleppo.[14]

Another example was a report
in Baladna News from April 2016 that, though massively supportive of the
government’s parliamentary elections that same month, included two significant
criticisms: 1) that many people could not vote as a result of security risks,
and 2) there was some dissatisfaction with the candidates, taking into account
the fact that recent parliaments had done little for the needs of the citizens,
and finding it hard to see how this one would be any different. Other reports foregrounded
the problems of corruption in various sectors including wheat prices and
telecommunications.

In February of 2017, new
salvos of criticism were hurled against the government following a country-wide
fuel crisis, especially in the coastal Lattakia province where most gas
stations ground to a halt for lack of fuel. Many minibus drivers announced an
open strike until a solution was found, while officials continued to have
access to fuel for their own vehicles. Most of the civilian population was
denied access to fuel because militiamen, security and army personnel
monopolized the limited fuel available. The loyalist social media pages blasted the Khamis government and oil ministry for their repeated
hollow promises when it came to securing fuel for the citizens.[15]

The regime did not engage in
any form of repression against these media outlets, despite their occasional
criticism. Although these pro-regime
media were far from constituting a new and independent media landscape, given their
support for the SAA and Assad leadership, the fact that such criticisms did
occur was an important development, indicating a change to a media environment
that was more representative and closer to the community’s views, rather than
simply a propaganda machine dominated by the regime and its associated élites. This has ensured that, even within the regime’s sphere of control,
a more open media culture might survive...

Media freedom in regime-held
regions remained more restricted than in opposition-controlled areas, except those
of the IS. This did not prevent the new methods of media coverage, which
appeared and expanded during the uprising, from laying the foundations for a
shift in Syria’s media culture in a post-war context.

The regime forces crush and
will have no problem in repressing all forms of opposition independent media in
the near future. But it would be difficult to envisage the regime targeting those
of its own supporters who had established a strong online media presence, and been
instrumental in promoting the regime’s narrative and propaganda to Syrians within
the country. This has ensured that, even within the regime’s sphere of control,
a more open media culture might survive and some form of growing tolerance of
criticism against the regime may continue to emerge.[16]

Conclusion

Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt,
and elsewhere inspired the Syrians to take to the streets in mid March 2011
with similar demands for freedom and dignity. The growth of the protest
movement allowed for a democratic media scene to expand, reflecting the new
energies on the ground.

Unfortunately, just as it was
a reflection of the strength of the protest movement, its repression led to a
considerably diminished democratic media scene, one that today is largely
mostly outside the country, although some pockets still exist within. However
there is still hope. The Syrian revolutionary process is a more thoroughly
documented uprising than has ever been seen before in history, notably thanks
to these democratic media.

There has been a wealth of recording,
of testimonies and documentation of the protest movement, the actors involved
and their modes of actions. In the seventies and eighties, Syria witnessed
strong popular and democratic resistance with significant strikes and
demonstrations throughout the country with mass followings, unfortunately this
memory was not salvaged and was not well-known to the new generation of
protesters rising in the country in 2011. The memories of the Syrian uprising
that erupted in March 2011 however will remain. This memory will serve not only
to look at the past, but to seize this past to build on future resistance. The
political experiences that have been accumulated since the beginning of the
uprising will not disappear.

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